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June 16, 2015 at 01:11 PM
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) can’t really say whether the $2.8 billion in exchange plan subsidies it paid from Jan. 1, 2014, through April 30, 2014, went to the right places.
Officials at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General (HHS OIG) have published that conclusion in a report blasting U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) efforts to make sure it was sending the right PPACA financial assistance payments to the right exchange plan issuers.
CMS, an arm of HHS, has been sending advance premium tax credit (APTC) money to help reduce the amounts low-income and moderate-income qualified health plan (QHP) enrollees pay for premiums out of their own pockets.
CMS has also sent cost-sharing reduction subsidy payments to QHPs to help reduce the amounts enrollees with incomes under 250 percent of the federal poverty level pay for deductibles, co-payments and coinsurance amounts.
HHS OIG investigators did not actually go into case files and see whether any premium tax credit or cost-sharing reduction subsidy payments were incorrect.
Instead, the investigators looked at a sample of $302 million in reimbursement transactions to see what kind of “internal controls” CMS was using to prevent and detect problems.
Because of the lack of proper controls, ”CMS cannot verify the accuracy of the nearly $2.8 billion it authorized for financial assistance payments during our audit period,” HHS OIG officials write in a summary of their investigators’ findings.
